


shadows settle on the place that you left

by fuckener



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-11
Updated: 2013-07-11
Packaged: 2017-12-19 03:34:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/878947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuckener/pseuds/fuckener
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Despite knowing you can’t get what Rose gave you from Roxy, you do not stop trying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	shadows settle on the place that you left

You are haunted by a past that isn’t exactly your own. Mostly, by a girl you haven’t exactly met.

In fashion school, she was the paper model of all your ideas. You’d dress her extravagantly and get in trouble for putting the same amount of overindulgent detail in her features as well as her clothes. The concentration you put into her likeness was painstaking, but you still never managed to get her eyes right; not that you were graded on them, but it twisted at your heart to look at her like that, so almost-perfect.

When you moved on, out of school and into the reality of the fashion industry, you kept working with her. The choppy haircut curling at high-arched cheeks and the shapely, small lips. The long, subtly curved body. The freckle dotting her knee. The slight bump in her nose. Her half-lidded violet eyes and the way they smiled at you. 

Then, people recognize you through Rose’s image. When you draw her, it’s almost like she exists with you again.

-

The world takes to your designs. They’re grandiose and a little old-fashioned, but that’s what you like to make - and you’re just lucky other people do, too. 

Auxiliatrix takes off, and you go from a shaky first few years of stressful internships with bosses who find you unsettlingly straight-faced but diligent and a subsequent stretch of selling clothes you made with a thirdhand sewing machine dirt cheap online to being more than financially comfortable in your thirties, having made a name for yourself through some trendy new celebrities and the support of critics.

Even though you suppose you and your business are doing well, still surprises you to have fans of your work. Especially fans interested enough in you to track you down in your studio - especially when one look at them tells you they’ve put real effort into their appearance, just for you.

This girl at the door is excited to see you. She smiles with her teeth, so wide the top ones start to bite into her lip to keep it from growing. Her eyes are bright when she looks at you. 

It’s Rose, you think, rushed and heady.

You stare at her, and when you do, the bones in your chest explode and splinter off, every fragment of them cutting deep into your heart. Your lungs shrink to a size so small every short breath you manage to take threatens to burst them apart. Your eyes heat up, inflamed.

And then she thrusts her hand towards you, still smiling brilliantly, and tells you, “Hi hi hi, Miss Maryam, I’m Roxy, and I love _everything_ you do -”

You listen to her, heartbroken. Her bubbly voice moves in through too many earnest tones and inflections. You shake her soft, elegant hands - long and tapered in at the tips, the nails small, hands you know except for the hot pink polish that makes you want to flinch. Something thick is caught in your throat, and your heart feels uncomfortably sore, like the muscle of it is just a tangle hanging inside of you.

She’s a model, and you know it before she tells you. She can’t be older than twenty-one. She is not Rose Lalonde, but she looks so alike her it makes you feel like dying, and she is so beautiful and so close to your idea of perfect that you know bone-deep you will give her anything she wants.

“Oh, is that what you’re working on right now?” she asks, pointing to the canvas paper across your desk. You nod, dumbly, and don’t think you’ve blinked once since you saw her first. She bounds over to get a better look, bent over your desk so her little dress sneaks up her pale thighs. Your hands curl helplessly by your sides.

“Holy shiiit,” Roxy comments, leaning in close for inspection. Her hair starts to fall over her face, the blonde overwhelming her pink dyed bangs. She looks up at you, grinning. “It’s beautiful!”

It’s hard, but you manage to quirk up one side of your mouth and say, “Thank you,” then add. “Roxy,” after a brief pause, testing her name out in your dry mouth. You watch her admiring it, and it’s too much. It’s too much. 

You take some tentative, nervous steps towards her until you’re close by her. She gives you a sideway glance you almost miss, and then her cheeks redden, her smile widens. While she stands surveying your work, she rolls rhythmically onto the balls of her feet. Happily.

“Would you,” you start, and then hesitate. You need a moment to think this over. Roxy looks at you with raised eyebrows while you take it, and you know it’s not her - _god_ , do you know - but you selfishly want to pretend. You selfishly _want_.

Swallowing, you try again. “Would you like to model it for me?”

-

One time, in a life that isn’t yours anymore, your girlfriend drank so much alcohol she made herself sick, and you had to kneel behind her, curled over her back with your hands securely keeping her hair out of the way and thumbs stroking her flushed cheeks. She had her elbows propped on the toilet seat, hung off the edges, and sat that way for a long time after she told you, “I think I’m done, now.”

You kissed the side of her neck and ran a hand through her greasy hair, then asked, carefully, “Is something in particular making you drink like this?” 

Recklessly, you’d wanted to say. Stupidly. You were mad, but mostly - mostly, you just loved her.

She’d taken in a deep breath you’d felt push back against your chest. For a moment, you thought she was going to tell you. You sat expectantly behind her, rubbing circles into her back, and then another five minutes had past and your hand slowed, stilled against her. She didn’t like to open up, and she was too sober to let anything slip by then. Sometimes, it hurt you that she would never trust you that way.

After another deep breath, she shifted around to face you, raising her legs over to bracket your middle. Even though she’d tried to school her expression blank, her eyes still looked miserable, and the downturned angle of her mouth made you sore to see.

“It’s going to be alright,” you lied.

She smiled sadly because she knew, and then her face crumpled and she buried it into your shoulder and clung onto you. You held her close and pressed your lips to the top of her head. The universe was collapsing onto you, then, and the knowledge of it was constant agony; it felt like less of a force when you were with Rose like this. Quiet little moments that reminded you your doomed little life was still worth living.

-

Today, you fit a dress to Roxy’s slight, familiar body. 

You have to use pins to hold the back in a bit, pushing them through the fabric with slow deliberation in case you nick her skin with one. She talks animatedly the whole time, throwing around her hands to emphasize and arching her neck to look back at you sometimes, trying to gauge your impression of her. Every time, you give her a small smile, and another piece of your heart chips off.

“What’s takin’ so long back there, Miss M?” she asks you, playfully swaying her hips.

You’ve been distracted by the freckled skin of her exposed shoulders for the past few moments - they’re constellations on a white sky, dotted across her like an intricate pattern. Pulling your eyes away, you cautiously slip in the last pin and ignore the way your breath trembles in your chest. “You can call me Kanaya, Roxy.”

“Oh,” she breathes, the surprise making her soft voiced and apparently a little speechless. Her body becomes less restless, quietens with her. Your eyes catch on to the way her smile closes in on itself when she presses her lips together, pleased, or flustered, maybe. “Okay.” She clears her throat, then sounds you out. “Kanaya.”

It gets a small smile out of you. When you check how the bodice fits around her waist, hands sliding around to fit to her, you feel her breath catch in time with yours. It’s a familiar, that slight curve down her hips. You’ve travelled down it a thousand times, dragged your way across it with your hands, your lips, the tip of your nose. You feel warm, and you want her to leave and you want to cry but you also want to bury your head into her white-blond hair and touch her, knowingly, as though she’s somebody she is not. 

“Kanaya,” she repeats, breathily. You see her hands twitch in on themselves. You can feel her quicker, shorter breaths under your hands with the rapid rise and fall of her chest. She’s young and excitable, but what’s your excuse?

It still feels like cheating, being attracted to anyone else, let alone this. Like you’re breaking fidelity to someone who doesn’t exist as far as this Earth is concerned. Once, you slept with a woman who looked like you’d imagine Vriska would as a human, and afterwards you’d felt so terrible and mean you couldn’t sleep in your bed again - you had to get a new one because the couch was killing our back. You had trouble separating this reality from the old one. 

You have trouble letting go.

Roxy’s perfume smells disarmingly of lavender, and when you notice, you take a quiet, deep inhale of it, let it fill you up inside like you used to. You are too far gone. When she turns her head to look at you over her shoulder, the imperfect slope of her nose makes your hands tighten on her hips.

The look she gives you is starstruck, disbelieving. Her face is red in blotches and - you missed those. 

“Miss - Kanaya,” Roxy begins, lowly. Her eyes are big and alarmingly pink. You’ve traced out the shapes of them every day of your life since you were eighteen. “I have your picture as my desktop wallpaper. And my phone. You’re in the silk green dress with the choker, it’s like - it’s smokin’ hot. I just... thought you should know the creepy stalker details before - before, I don’t know -”

“I find you upsettingly endearing,” you interrupt simply, eyebrows pushed together in the pain of how honest what you’re saying is.

She stares. Then, slowly, she turns to you. You can feel the soft fabric sliding under your fingers as she moves - the dress is orange, suns stitched into it, and you’ve kept it all to yourself for years but after this you think you’d better make a better one and hide it away- and you can feel her nerves when she rests her hands lightly over your shoulders. Her fingers squeeze a bit, convulsively.

You take a moment just to hold her. Close your eyes. Breathe her in. Thumb the dimple of her spine at the small of her back. Be a sixteen year old alien again in love with the only girl worth hurting for.

Roxy surprises you, then: shoots onto her tiptoes and kisses you clumsily, gently. Knocks you right out of the real world with it.

-

It feels like her and you, making the same mess as always, but not quite.

-

Almost immediately, Roxy is in love with you. Almost immediately, you feel sick, and dirty, and mean for it. You have done something wholly terrible with this nice girl who loves you who you could never love back. You came with a name bit back on your tongue that wasn’t hers; that wasn’t really anybodies.

You’re eternally stuck. This limbo afterlife where you’re still consumed by nonexistent problems and people is going to break you apart, you think, a slab of dread settling into your stomach.

“This is me,” Roxy chirps, pressing a card into your palm. Her hair is messy now, cheeks red and eyes cheerful, even if the make-up on them is all smudged now. She is lovely, so lovely, so almost-right it kills you to look at her as much as it brings you to life. “My number. In case you want to meet for business arrangements such as this, et cetera.” She huffs out a funny laugh at herself. “So you should - call it.”

You shouldn’t, but you nod because you will, and you kiss her cheek to calm her down, to feel the smooth, heated skin there against your lips again.

Awkwardly you say, “It was nice meeting you, Roxy,” and knock yourself effectively out of your reverie. Roxy. Not Rose. You wish you could go back to when you hesitated and change your mind, or go back to when the only time you saw Rose’s face in reality was by the sweep of ink from your pen.

Roxy laughs again. She is so happy when she looks at you that you want to tell her to avert her eyes. You’re a monster for this. Playing with a girl’s heart at the expense of your own.

“A _pleasure_ ,” she jokes, smile crooked and pleased, and then she leaves.

You watch her go. When the door clicks shut behind her, you let out a breath that feels like it burns your throat, your lungs. There’s whips of fire in you, slashing you from the inside. You let yourself burn for a while.

-

When you really think about it, you don’t know why you feel so attached to the life that you lost. It was doomed from the very beginning, and all you seemed to have in it were friends you couldn’t trust not to kill you and a world you had no chance of saving. 

You’d give anything to do it again. 

You miss the Alternian sun on your skin. You miss the growl of Karkat’s voice, the weight of Sollux’s arm in yours when you lead him around. You miss your horns and your fangs. You miss Rose so much that when you remember lying beside her in her too-big, too-comfortable bed or having her kiss you just under your lips sometimes you cry without meaning to.

You miss having any friends at all. A real purpose. This life feels lonely, and empty, even when you’re successful and admired by a world of people. You don’t belong in this skin. Your feet were never intended to touch the surface of the Earth.

-

The only tangible thing you have left of that life is Dave.

It took twenty-six years for you to find him, to confirm you did have a past-life still flickering in your head. He makes weird, thumping music that you heard at fashion shows for years before you linked them to him. When you found him, you were shamefully relieved he was as sad as you were, if not worse.

His presence reassures you you aren’t insane. It’s an odd comfort: you never spoke much and you don’t now, not really, but you like to drop in and sit with him while he gets stoned out of his mind and then goes on a rant that belongs in another universe - Dave’s mind is a self-diagnosed clusterfuck of other Daves, the living ones from your world and the dead and infinite Daves from other universes you know nothing about. They’re all inside him at once

You have enough trouble with just one set of memories from a past-life.

Sober, he tries his best to reminisce about things from the lives you shared. Stoned, you have no idea what he’s talking about. Thankfully, you’ve caught him mid-roll tonight.

You tell him the condensed version of this: you feel sick with guilt over what happened with Roxy for cluttered, overwhelming reasons. You feel bad for taking advantage of feelings you can’t reciprocate. You feel bad because you can’t reciprocate them, even though Roxy is so sweet, even though a girl like that would be your best shot at happiness if you ever had one here. You feel bad for cheating on Rose. You feel bad for wanting to love anyone else.

And when you’re done, Dave tells you apologetically, “What a fucking mess.” He hasn’t looked at you since you came in. He says it triggers off about an estimated vagillion fucking things at once in his brain when he so much as glances at you without his shades on.

You make a noise of agreement and smooth your skirt down over your legs, keeping them as close to you as possible. You try not to touch things in his apartment. The first time he let you in he said he was going for a kind of crack-den feung shui, and you’d told him it was a remarkable success.

Even with his abundance of random stuff, it still feels empty to you. Cold like a house nobody lives in, even though he rarely ever leaves. You think he fills it up with anything in attempt to change that. Every time you come in, you imagine offering to help him decorate it, that you could breathe life into it, but you don’t have it in you and neither does he. 

He’d rather be swallowed up by pot smoke than try to move on and you’d rather drown a hundred mannequins you’ve had made to look like Rose with dresses than ever, ever act like she didn’t exist. Not in this world, but the one that counts.

He offers you first shot of the joint as a consolation, but you refuse, as always.

“You know, I’m going through all my omniDave adventures up there,” Dave tells you, waking you from the inevitable depressing thought process your semi-companionable silences always lead to. He’s taking a long, thoughtful drag. Without his glasses on, you can see the dark shadows circling his eyes. You privately hate when he doesn’t wear them. “I don’t think I can remember one other lifetime where you and Rose weren’t together. It was a universal constant. It was the John Cusack of couples.”

You stare at him. He pauses before taking his next draw.

“Okay, in retrospect that was a total dick thing to say. Shit.” Hesitatingly, he puts a hand down on the sofa as near to you as he can go. “Sorry.”

“It’s... It’s alright,” you tell him, but it isn’t. It isn’t fucking alright. It makes you seethe inside, makes you so miserable you’re dizzy with it, makes you shake and tremble and feel sick. She’s missing from you, like a limb, an organ, a twin heart that’s left an empty space gaping in your chest. You are not supposed to exist without Rose.

And this is the only universe where you have to.

-

Once, you were in a dream bubble together, and it looked like Rose’s human home.

It was strange inside - stones with the faces of wizards carved into them, a lot of alcohol you decidedly did not comment on, and then you moved onto her bedroom. “Everything’s too small, now,” she remarked with a T-shirt folded over one arm, but she looked around the room as she said it, at all the books, the computer, knitting needles. You perched on her little single bed and surveyed everything with silent fascination.

She looked at you there and smiled that funny, playful way she did sometimes when she forgot about the weight of the universe bearing down on both. It quirked lewdly at the corners of her mouth and you could never help returning it a little, although you were always admittedly more flustered about it.

“You’re doing that thing,” you informed her with an uncharacteristic lack of articulacy, and shyly averted her eyes.

Her smile widened and she got closer, reached you. She touched the side of your face and nudged your head up to look back up at her - she was wagging her eyebrows, biting on her bottom lip, and you laughed and cupped her hand in yours. You were so in love the world almost stopped ending.

-

You see Roxy again. And again, and again. You’ve always been cautious to avoid drugs and liquor, in every life you’ve known, but apparently that wasn’t enough to stave off addiction. You desperately yearn for that feeling back, of complete contentedness, of shrunken worries, of completion. Unfortunately, despite knowing you can’t get that from Roxy, you do not stop trying.

She brings take-out and eats with you in the living room, filling up the silences when you’re too dry-throated to talk with her endearing chatter, and eating in an uncharacteristically prim way that you recognise. She licks the corners of her mouth when she’s done eating and then yours, and you snort and then kiss her before she can pull away again.

Roxy has no siblings, like Dave. The family they had before is gone. You know Dave feels that hole in his life where someone important is meant to go, you know he has one tidy bedroom in his house he only goes in to clean up every once in a while that belongs to a brother that doesn’t exist, but you wonder if Roxy has the same phantom pain.

Whenever you’re together, she’s happy enough. You indulge her, spoil her, refuse her when she insists on making you come first. You nuzzle the soft insides of her thighs and feel like you’re the one being spoilt for a moment, and when she whimpers, she sounds the exact same as the ghost girl following you around in your head like a sickness. You lick the slick parting of her lips and inside of her, push your lips against her in a kiss while you work and drink up all her wetness, stroking the backs of your fingers against the shaky muscles in her stomach.

The way she cries out your name is perfect, you think, and she whispers it even when you’re done, caressing your face and looking down at you, knelt between the spread of her legs. The pink dye is fading from her hair now and it’s just the eyes that are off, and normally when you notice these things you feel your self-loathing hit you like a tidal wave, but with your hand fervently working beneath your underwear right now, you barely feel it at all.

She keeps saying your name for you while you contract around your fingers, feel yourself soaking them wet - “ _Kanaya_ ” - and you’re gone in an orgasm that racks into you deep, rattles you from the inside out, makes you let out a pathetic sob.

You pant for breath with your head in the curve of her hip. She strokes your sweat-matted hair from your face, breathlessly says, “Holy fucking shit,” and then there’s quiet between you. 

You close your eyes. You pretend.

-

After a few weeks more, Roxy basically moves in. She is your girlfriend at this point, probably, but whenever you’re asked about it at work, out in the real world, you think for a bizarre second they’re asking you about Rose. Your girlfriend. 

It happens, and doesn’t stop happening. You don’t know what to do. You’re weak with the sex, the smell of her, how easy it is sometimes to feel her sling her arm around you in the morning and imagine Rose is pressed up naked against you, hungover and clingy.

“This sure as shit snowballed,” Dave says when you tell him. He’s wearing his sunglasses today, so he can give you an inspecting look. “Are you here because you’re having an unquenchable vaginal thirst for all of Rose’s pseudo-relatives?”

“No,” you snap. You don’t like when he jokes about that - you mostly tell yourself it’s not Rose’s mom or vice versa in this universe, so it doesn’t matter, but really it does, because it’s the family resemblance that gets to you. Sometimes, you see her in Dave too; but you really have less than no interest in doing what you have been with Roxy with him. It isn’t physically possible, actually. “I don’t like when you joke about that. So stop.”

He throws his hands up and drops back against his plush sofa, kicking his feet up on the coffee table. “It’s a valid question.” You give him a look, jaw tense, and he relents. “How are you feeling about this set-up then? Appropriately freaked out?”

With a sigh, you rub your forehead and concede a, “Yes, appropriately very freaked out and confused and filled with self-hatred. I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“Fair enough,” he shrugs, and then he effectively takes you’re mind off of it with a theatrical, heavily embellished retelling of the time he alchemized a full-blown hoarder’s collection of Barbie items and arranged them all in Karkat’s bedroom, and Karkat blew a gasket and threatened to cut his balls off with a tiny plastic stiletto heel. He tells you similarly ridiculous stories all night, even microwaves something for you to eat, and it’s much more than usual but you appreciate it. You appreciate a chance to relive.

Some of his song lyrics are just these stories, ripped out of another world and put to a beat and rapped by him, but you don’t like listening to them. They’re very sad. You don’t need any excuse to miss your old life even more. 

-

Roxy is jealous of Dave. Roxy is jealous because she knows she should be jealous of someone, and you don’t know how she figured that out.

It isn’t an angry jealousy, either. You wish it was - you deserve that, you deserve for her to be furious with you, to detest you. Instead, she gets drunk at the afterparty of one of your shows, and you have to take her home early because of how utterly inconsolable she is.

She cries the whole way back in the car but won’t tell you why no matter how much you insist she’d feel better if she did. Watching her cry like that, helplessly, so miserable, makes you feel worse than you’d thought imaginable. You’re insides sink to the bottom of you. You want to cry just looking at her - it’s _Roxy_ , the only happy thing you’ve known in your life, and this is what you’ve done to her. This is what you’ve made her.

When you pull in at the house, you immediately unbuckle the two of you and pull her trembling body into your arms. She lets out sobs against you that jerk at her whole body and says unevenly, “You must look at me and just see s-some - some stupid _kid_. Sometimes it’s like you, you look at me and you look so _disappointed_ with what you see and I - I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know who you want me to be and I wish I did because - _god_ , ‘cause I really love you, and I want you to love me back. I want it so much. Nobody ever loves me back.” The shoulder of your dress is completely damp. It even goes down the sleeve a bit, and you feel her tears hot against your skin through it, burning you. “Tell me what I can do, please, _please_. Kanaya, please.”

You feel numb, like you’ve been stabbed in the gut, everything muted around you by the post-explosion ringing in your ears. When you come back to yourself, you feel disgusting and horrible. You wish Roxy would hit you, but she just clings to you and kisses desperately at the hollow of your collarbone.

With unsteady hands, you stroke her hair. “Roxy, you are perfect,” you tell her, quietly but clearly, and she lets out a pained moan. You kiss her hair. Her grip on you is starting to hurt. “There is nothing about you that needs fixed. I love who you are,” you say, and you mean it, but you aren’t going to clarify exactly how you mean it. 

You aren’t going to tell her you love her as much as you can love any girl in this universe that isn’t your home. As much as you can any love a girl that isn’t Rose.

She pulls back to look at you, face messy with runny mascara and smudged red lips, pink eyes surrounded by a sore looking redness, and cheeks coloured from crying. You kiss her soundly, and she’s silent against you, still for a moment. The world is quiet for you, taunting you; when you pull away, she’s still Roxy.

-

Dave told you that night about a life where you had gotten married to Rose. You met her through work because you edited her books and had some major issues with them, and Rose had been pissed off to the high heavens when you said that, he told you, but then you’d met and you’d actually had good ideas. She kissed you when you handed her the first published book she’d ever wrote, and you were together for a long time. Dave said it had pissed him off a little, how happy you guys were, but he realised that was a mistake when he got here.

That night, you came home late and crawled quietly into bed with Roxy even though you knew she was still awake. Thoughts of you and Dave kept her awake. Thoughts of you and anyone else, thoughts of you lying to her. 

You knew it, felt sick with yourself for it, but you still went through with this next part: kissed her head and put your arm around her, and pretended you lived a life you never have next to someone you and only _this_ you are destined not to be with.

-

One day you come home and Roxy has cut her bangs to look exactly like Rose’s.

It’s the sketches you have neatly arranged by the desk in the bedroom. They all look the same. You are obsessed with what you will never have and now Roxy is here, looking exactly like it. She probably thinks you want this. She probably only did this out of a hopeless need to make you happy, to have you love her back.

“Do you like it?” she asks, with her disruptively pink eyes looking at you wide and desperate.

You feel like crying looking into them, but your splinter punctured heart is all bled out, now. 

You do. You tell her.

-

A few times, back in your old life where the world ended, you lay in your girlfriend’s arms and both of you tried to forget about dying. She pestered you for answers to questions on troll culture and you responded in kind, asking her about humans, and human romance and human love - that’s all humans had, instead of quadrants.

“That is redundant,” you told her, and she shrugged one shoulder, trailed a fingertip up your side so you shivered and leaned into her.

“Loving four people at once sounds redundant to me,” she countered. “Humans can only really love one at a time, I suppose,” she said - but you’d felt it even then in your grey skin, and it tied you to her like an anchor.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm having a lot of rosekan emotions and it is messy


End file.
